Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[LFC]

The Maricopa County faudit is imploding into a complete farce.The Cyber Ninjas keep "finding" things that simply prove that they are not only incompetent at elections audits but that they don't even seem to be competent enough to pull over data from a server. This article is a brutal takedown showing just how badly they suck. The Elections Board is done with them.

On Monday, the county released a 14-page letter and 17 pages of accompanying documentation that shows, among other things:

• That no voter files were deleted before the servers were turned over the Senate, as auditors claim. The county went into the sort of detail that only a computer geek could love about why the auditors might not be able to find the records, suggesting that they either lost the files or don’t how to locate the files.

“Their stunning lack of a basic understanding for how their software works is egregious and only made worse by the false tweet sent defaming the hardworking employees of Maricopa County,” the county said, in its letter to Fann.

• That the broken seals on ballot bags were standard operating procedure. Election day ballots are counted in polling places then sealed into black canvas bags and transported, along with a memory card showing the vote count, by bipartisan teams to the county’s elections headquarters. The bags (other than those used for sample audits) remain sealed until after the election is certified and the challenge period is over. Then, bipartisan teams break the seals and put them into newly sealed boxes for long-term storage.

• The “pink slips” – called “Early Voting Transmittal Slips” – do not reflect missing ballots. “Because it is obvious that your contractors have no understanding of these matters,” the county wrote, “a brief tutorial is in order.”

[snip]

What it also boils down to is this:

Fann turned over our ballots, our voter information and the county’s tabulation machinery to a bunch of Trump zealots who don’t know what they are doing.

So you’ll have to excuse the supervisors if they don’t show up Tuesday on Fann’s carpet or contribute in any way to the “spectacle” that is taking place at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in between high school graduations.

"I just want to make it clear I will not be responding to any more requests from this sham process,” Sellers said. “Finish what you're calling an audit, and be ready to defend your report."

Then there's this which makes it clear they faudit is actually violating Arizona state law.

County officials asked Fann to end the audit, which “has devolved into a circus.”

“You are using purple lights and spinning tables,” they wrote. “You are hunting for bamboo. These are not things that serious auditors of elections do.

“You are photographing ballots contrary to the laws that the Senate helped enact, and you are sending those images to unidentified places and people. You have repeatedly lost control of your twitter account, which has tweeted things that appear to be the rantings of a petulant child – not the serious statements of a serious audit.

“None of this is inspiring confidence.”

Mostly, it’s just inspiring late-night comics.

[LFC]

Well, when you put it that way...

A supporter of former President Donald Trump is calling for the arrest of election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona for their refusal to overturn the 2020 election.

In a video that he posted of himself, the Trump supporter ranted that Maricopa County officials weren't obeying the wishes of the pro-Trump "audit" of Arizona ballots that's drawn widespread criticism even from many Republicans in the state.

"I call on all people of Arizona to demand everyone to be friggin' arrested!" he fumed. "The board of supervisors should be arrested immediately for not following court orders, for lying, perjury, for suppressing the evidence."

The Trump supporter didn't elaborate on what court orders the election officials had disobeyed but he nonetheless went on to attack them.

"These people are crooked!" he ranted. "They need to go to prison right now until they give us the truth!"

He then singled out Maricopa County Board of Supervisors member Clint Hickman for specific abuse.

"Get off your butt and tell the truth!" he yelled at Hickman. "I called your office the other day and you never even care what I say! You're going to prison, boy... I've had it! I'm going to drive down to Arizona, I'm going to arrest you myself!"

F***ing MAGAt moron. And speaking of getting of your butt, maybe he should take his own advice and not just to hit the local pizza place.

[LFC]

New Hampshire Republicans are so afraid of people voting in numbers that they've created a "unique" solution in case the evil Democrats pass a federal law protecting the right to vote. You can smell the panic.

Democrats’ sweeping democracy overhaul bill, the For the People Act, may have virtually zero chance of becoming law. But Republicans in New Hampshire are plotting a backup plan for evading it, just in case.

A top Republican in the New Hampshire House is seeking to amend an innocuous state election bill to blunt the effect of the Democrats’ signature legislation. Her proposal appears to allow the state to create a bifurcated election system, with different rules for federal vs. state elections, in the event that Congress does pass the For the People Act, which contains various provisions setting national standards for ballot access.

That would mean that when Granite Staters voted in federal elections, they would have access to early voting, no-excuse absentee voting and online registration — all required under the ballot access mandates in the federal elections bill, which is also known as S. 1. But for state elections, voters would be subject to New Hampshire’s stricter regime for voting, which does not allow early voting, offers only limited excuses for mail voting and does not allow online registrations.

“It’s bananas,” said Olivia Zink, executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights organization Open Democracy.

“This would require two ballots to be distributed. You’d have one set of rules to register to vote for the federal election, you’d have one set of rules to register to vote for the state elections. You’d have two different checklists, you’d have two different ways to request absentee ballots. It would double the cost of everything,” Zink told TPM.

[LFC]

Gee, waddya' know. The "deleted" files that were the fauditors' smoking gun just magically turned up. Who could have seen THAT coming.

Last week, some seven months after he lost the presidential election, Donald Trump got hyped about some fresh evidence that he claimed showed that he was definitely screwed out of victory. In a statement, the ex-president insisted that a crucial file subpoenaed by auditors during the Republican-controlled review of the 2020 election in Arizona had disappeared, writing: “The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!” Trump went on to complain about how the media was afraid to cover the sensational story. Well, now someone has found those files after looking at some different computer drives. According to The New York Times, a contractor for the state senate, which is carrying out the partisan review, has told GOP lawmakers that the file was found on four drives in the election equipment. The contractor, Ben Cotton, described Trump’s missing evidence claim as “a moot point.”

[goldenvalley]

May 19, 2021 13:12:59 GMT LFC said:

Gee, waddya' know. The "deleted" files that were the fauditors' smoking gun just magically turned up. Who could have seen THAT coming.

Last week, some seven months after he lost the presidential election, Donald Trump got hyped about some fresh evidence that he claimed showed that he was definitely screwed out of victory. In a statement, the ex-president insisted that a crucial file subpoenaed by auditors during the Republican-controlled review of the 2020 election in Arizona had disappeared, writing: “The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!” Trump went on to complain about how the media was afraid to cover the sensational story. Well, now someone has found those files after looking at some different computer drives. According to The New York Times, a contractor for the state senate, which is carrying out the partisan review, has told GOP lawmakers that the file was found on four drives in the election equipment. The contractor, Ben Cotton, described Trump’s missing evidence claim as “a moot point.”

Those CyberNinjas sure know what they're doing! They look like real experts in...what? Grifting?

[LFC]

Mockery is sometimes the best medicine. Two AZ Republicans held a live-stream meeting to talk about the faudit. The election officials from Maricopa County declined to attend since they've already called it a sham. But rather than just let the liars run free they decided to use the Maricopa County Twitter account to heckle them in real time. It was brutal.

Two Republicans in the Arizona Senate held a bizarre live-streamed meeting Tuesday with the leaders of a shady “audit” into the 2020 election results in the state’s largest county, Maricopa.

The county’s board of supervisors, which is dominated 4-1 by Republicans, had been invited to attend. But they declined, writing in a letter Monday that, “we have wasted enough County resources. People’s tax dollars are real, your ‘auditors’ are not.”

Still, just because the county didn’t have a representative in the room didn’t mean county officials weren’t watching the proceedings. In fact, as the meeting progressed, Maricopa County started … heckling it, on Twitter.

This is a nice general swat at the gov't officials who brought in the fauditors.

Maricopa County
@maricopacounty

-How does the Senate justify bypassing ARS Sec. 35-149 which requires them to publicly account for funding sources for government-sponsored projects? azleg.gov/ars/35/00149.htm

-Do the cyber ninjas have swords?

And then there's the infamous "deleted" files.

Maricopa County
@maricopacounty

Sooo... they’ve now “recovered” the allegedly deleted files? Wonder if our technical document explaining this helped. maricopa.gov/DocumentCenter

Maricopa County
@maricopacounty

Just want to underscore that AZ Senate’s @arizonaaudit account accused Maricopa County of deleting files- which would be a crime- then a day after our technical letter explained they were just looking in the wrong place- all of a sudden “auditors” have recovered the files. 🤔

Maricopa County
@maricopacounty

The Senate President says the dispute over elections isn’t personal. The subpoena, the attempt to hold the Board in contempt w/ possible jail time, and the @arizonaaudit lie that the county deleted files all suggest otherwise.

[LFC]

The Arizona faudit may have just gotten a lot more expensive.

The price of the sketchy, already-expensive Arizona audit may have gotten even higher.

According to a letter Thursday from Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Maricopa County — the target of a 2020 recount ordered by the state’s GOP Senate — may need to replace the election equipment it turned over to the auditors under a legislative subpoena.

Hobbs’ letter came on the heels of an Arizona Republic report Wednesday that laid out the many questions surrounding how the auditors had been handling the voting machines. The auditors had not complied with their own plans for live-streaming their handling of the equipment, according to the newspaper, nor would they clarify who had had access to the machines or where the equipment was being stored.

Hobbs said that, in keeping with guidance from the federal government’s cybersecurity arm, the equipment should not be reused, given the chain-of-custody issues.

“[M]y Office consulted with election technology and security experts, including at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, regarding the appropriate next steps, and each unanimously advised that once election officials lose custody and control over voting systems and components, those devices should not be reused in future elections,” she said.

Hobbs had gotten the advice from an analyst from the agency and then via a recommendation from the agency’s Election Security Initiative, a Hobbs spokesperson told TPM. Hobbs’ office initially reached out to the agency on May 7. They explained “the circumstances of the audit,” and in particular, that “the county election officials’ custody and control over the equipment had been lost to third-party contractors of the Senate,” the Hobbs spokesperson told TPM.

[LFC]

Liz Cheney may be openly against The Big Lie but she's pretty much all in on voter suppression. She may be a fascist but she's not a lying fascist. Well, at least not about this.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) recognizing the Capitol insurrection was ex-President Donald Trump’s fault means she actually has a problem with her party’s attacks on voting.

“Well, I think you have to look at the specifics of each one of those efforts,” she said when Axios reporter Jonathan Swan asked in a pre-recorded interview, published Sunday, if she saw any connection between Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election being rigged against him and the wave of Republicans’ anti-voting bills across the country.

The Wyoming Republican demurred again when Swan pointed out that it’s hardly a coincidence that the legislation began pouring in after the election.

“I think everybody should want a situation and a system where people who ought to be able to vote and have the right to vote can vote and people who don’t shouldn’t,” she said.

Cheney repeated again that “you’ve gotta look at each individual state law.”

[LFC]

And the Arizona faudit becomes even more absurd and corrupt.

A fundraising group for the partisan “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results will now reportedly play a role in selecting the people counting Arizonans’ ballots.

The group, backed by ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, will handle background checks and non-disclosure agreements for audit workers, the Arizona Republic reported Saturday based on an email it obtained.

The audit was authorized and funded in part by Arizona’s Republican-controlled state Senate, but in practice is being led by contractors fueled by private donations.

[goldenvalley]

May 24, 2021 15:38:01 GMT LFC said:

And the Arizona faudit becomes even more absurd and corrupt.

A fundraising group for the partisan “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results will now reportedly play a role in selecting the people counting Arizonans’ ballots.

The group, backed by ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, will handle background checks and non-disclosure agreements for audit workers, the Arizona Republic reported Saturday based on an email it obtained.

The audit was authorized and funded in part by Arizona’s Republican-controlled state Senate, but in practice is being led by contractors fueled by private donations.

The frightening thing about this is that a large number of people will say that's perfectly okay because the evil elections officials are in on the fraud and they don't trust politicians, even the ones that demanded this exercise, to produce the results they want.

Ten thousand audits showing no evidence of fraud will not convince any of that crew that there was no fraud.  Absence of evidence simply means the evil doers are trickier than they thought. Only Trump might be able to convince his followers there was no fraud and we know that will never happen.

[jackd]

You'd think that selection of vote counters would be governed by statute and/or ordinance.

[LFC]

This is insane. Ohio Republicans took a big, steaming shit on Dominion voting machines and blocked the purchase of badly needed new machines. I suspect that this will come up in Dominion's multiple lawsuits. At least the state supreme court stepped in, finally.

The Ohio Supreme Court sided with the Stark County, Ohio board of elections Monday night, compelling the county commissioners to unlock funds for new voting machines — money they’d previously blocked after a wave of Trump supporters besieged them with conspiracy theories.

The county board of elections decided to buy $1.5 million worth of new voting machines manufactured by Dominion voting systems back in December. Theirs were falling apart, and they wanted to obtain new ones in time for a special election in May.

That election came and went, as county officials were locked in a conspiracy theory-infused wrestling match that made its way up to the state Supreme Court. After the all-Republican slate of county commissioners rejected the board’s vote to purchase the machines, having been overwhelmed with calls from the conspiracy theorists, the board asked the Court to force them to approve the purchase.

That decision finally came down Monday night, after the board initially filed the lawsuit in March. It wasn’t fast enough to get new machines set up for the May election, and it likely won’t be for an August one — but as county board of elections chair Sam Ferruccio confirmed to TPM Monday night, it’s fast enough to replace the machines for the November general election.

Meanwhile, an organization founded by former Trump staffers filed a separate lawsuit against the elections board, alleging that they broke open meetings laws while deciding to purchase the Dominion machines. That case is ongoing.

There was one concurrent decision and one dissent, alongside the majority in the state Supreme Court decision.

[LFC]

More of Trump's MAGA fascists are running for offices (paywalled) where they can control the vote. Make no mistake, this is exactly how democracy ends. They will stop at nothing to steal power from the people.

A handful of proponents of the Big Lie have launched bids for secretary of state — elected, state-level positions that will have a say in voting operations for future election cycles.

TPM covered the absurdity of Rep. Jody Hice’s (R-GA) decision to ditch his congressional seat to run against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, one of the main targets of Trump’s ire following his Georgia loss. As one of the more vocal Republican House members who voted not to certify President Biden’s electoral college victory on insurrection day, the career move is bizarre, but not altogether surprising.

And he’s not alone. As Politico notes here, others who buttressed Trump’s anti-democracy crusade have now announced bids to run for secretary of state in states that will play key roles in not only determining the balance of Congress during the midterms, but also who wins the presidency in 2024. Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem (an enthusiast of the state’s ongoing, sketchy audit), Nevada’s Jim Marchant (former member of the state assembly who’s cried election fraud over his failed 2020 congressional bid) and Kristina Karamo (a Michigan Republican who was part of failed legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election results) are now all running for secretaries of state in their respective states.

Both Hice and Marchant are running to unseat sitting Republicans who defended their state’s elections and didn’t go along with the former president’s efforts to steal the presidency. The other two are running against sitting Democrats. All four have been vocal supporters of Trump and the big lie. Trump has already endorsed Hice’s bid. And while the actual real-time logistics of running an election are often left up to local and county officials in most states, the campaign platform for such an elected office is still relevant for distrust-sowing purposes.

The four join a growing pool of Americans running for public office post-2020 who seem to be banking on little other than their Trumpian affiliations to get elected — see: gun couple Mark McCloskey’s bid for the Missouri Senate seat or Andrew Giuliani’s longshot run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in New York, likely hoping voters will look past his lack of political experience due to his last name (and because he’s Trump’s golf partner).

[LFC]

There's always another slimeball, swampy connection in MAGAland. These folks were involved in the Arizona faudit.

A handwritten note from December appears to tie pro-Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell to one of the companies contracted to carry out the “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results.

The Arizona Mirror reported on the document Monday: It describes tech contractor Wake TSI’s intent to examine voting machines and 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Pennsylvania, and includes the signatures of various officials from Fulton County.

Wake TSI would go on to become one of a handful of contractors performing the Arizona audit. On Tuesday, news broke that the company’s Arizona contract had ended on May 14, and that Wake TSI had opted not to renew its relationship with the Arizona state Senate, which authorized the audit.

The bottom of the Pennsylvania document contains the hand-written text, “Senator Mastriano set this review of Fulton Counties [sic] voter system and mail-in ballots. Wake TSI is contracted to Defending the Republic a 501(c)4.”

Powell has advertised Defending the Republic as a legal fund supporting her lawsuits over 2020 results in various battleground states.

[LFC]

Some of the companies who came out in favor of protecting voting rights quietly gave big fat contributions to groups that are leading the charge to crush voting rights. The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) in particular has been all in on voter suppression.

Major corporations won praise in the weeks after the January 6 Capital riot by expressing support for voting rights and promising to suspend their political action committee donations to Republican lawmakers who had tried to overturn the election. Corporate America would be a vanguard in the defense of democracy, some headlines suggested.

Brand-name corporations and corporate lobbying groups still funneled $15 million last year to two major GOP groups—the Republican Attorneys General Association and the Republican State Legislative Committee—after the organizations and their officials pushed to curtail voting rights and overturn the 2020 election, according to IRS records reviewed by The Daily Poster.

Meanwhile, many major companies continue to support the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—even as the powerful lobby group has been leading the fight against federal legislation protecting voting rights.

In November 2020, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) backed a Supreme Court amicus brief requesting that the high court prevent Pennsylvania election officials from counting mail-in ballots postmarked on election day.

[goldenvalley]

May 26, 2021 13:27:41 GMT LFC said:

Some of the companies who came out in favor of protecting voting rights quietly gave big fat contributions to groups that are leading the charge to crush voting rights. The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) in particular has been all in on voter suppression.

Raise your hand if you are surprised by this.  

[Traveler]

Shouldn't there be a clearinghouse for these corporate donations so folks can complain and boycott? I don't do goya anymore.

[Deleted]

May 28, 2021 1:22:14 GMT Traveler said:

Shouldn't there be a clearinghouse for these corporate donations so folks can complain and boycott? I don't do goya anymore.

How can you live without Goya?! 

Such a clearing house exists. It is called McConnell's McMansion. Transparency is verboten. Trespassers are not tolerated and dealt severely. 

[LFC]

Stephen Richer, the Republican who won the position of Maricopa County Recorder in November, just wrote a scathing piece that chronicles the insanity of the faudit for (of all places) the National Review. He is unsparing of his criticisms of both the reasons given for holding the faudit and the total incompetence of those supposedly performing it.  I learned a few things from this piece such as the fact that Cyber Ninjas never actually applied to perform the election audit yet were selected over a company that actually had expertise. Hmmmmm.

I’m a libertarian-minded Republican. I hate taxes. Especially the income tax. But I pay all required taxes.

I suspect you also pay your taxes. And like most Americans, you probably don’t cheat or lie.

For that reason, even though an IRS audit might annoy you and cause you some stress, you’d eventually realize that you have nothing to fear as long as the audit is done fairly and properly.

But you’d likely feel differently if the IRS outsourced the audit to someone who:

- Had no applicable professional credentials
- Had never previously run a tax audit
- Believed that Hugo Chavez had nefariously controlled your tax-auditing software
- Had publicly stated prior to examining your taxes that you’d certainly committed tax fraud

That is what is happening to elections in Maricopa County, Ariz. — the home of almost two-thirds of Arizona’s voting population.

In the immediate aftermath of the November 3, 2020, election, Maricopa County oversaw a hand-count audit of over 47,000 votes, a statistically significant sampling as determined by multiple professional statisticians. The recognized political parties — Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian — administered the hand count in groups of three volunteers appointed by party leadership. Those hand-counted results matched the machine-tabulated results with 100 percent accuracy. Perfect accuracy. This was the third hand count performed by the political parties in 2020 that confirmed the accuracy of Maricopa County’s tabulation equipment.

The same is true of the pre-election and post-election tests done of the tabulation equipment — 100 percent accuracy. The machines are state and federally certified, and the county has used machines owned by the same parent company (Dominion) since 1998 without problems or discrepancies.

Nonetheless, in February, the county enlisted two professional, certified elections-equipment companies to analyze the oft-voiced concerns regarding the Dominion tabulation software and hardware. The county asked the two election companies to do everything necessary to:

- Analyze hacking vulnerabilities of both the tabulation hardware and software
- Verify that no malware had been installed to the tabulators
- Determine if the tabulators had connected to the Internet at any point before, during, or after the election
- Assess if any vote switching occurred as a result of the tabulators

Both companies used methodologies honed over the course of hundreds of previous examinations. Neither company found problems with the tabulators. Their reports are available online.

We also had the benefit of the eight court cases challenging Maricopa County’s election administration. None of those eight cases found any widespread inaccuracy, fraud, or wrongdoing. Only two were dismissed for lack of standing.

Armed with these facts and professional assessments, I made the only reasonable conclusion I could make: Maricopa County accurately tabulated the November 3 ballots. I say this without any bias or skin in the game. The irony of all of this is that I was merely a candidate in November. In fact, I defeated the incumbent Democrat who was previously the top elections official for the county. (I guess he forgot to rig his own election? Or was it a clever ruse?)

But the Arizona Senate didn’t feel comfortable with that conclusion and is now conducting its own audit. For an unknown reason, Maricopa County is the only county of Arizona’s 15 counties being audited, and only the top two contests on the ballot — the presidential, in which Joe Biden (D) defeated incumbent Donald Trump (R), and the Senate race, in which Mark Kelly (D) defeated incumbent Martha McSally (R) — are being audited. Down-ballot, Republicans held the state legislature and won five of the six countywide seats.

At least one professional, widely known, certified elections company (Clear Ballot) applied to do the Senate’s audit. The Senate rejected that official bid.

The Senate has not provided any details on its selection process and ultimately chose a company that did not formally apply. That company is Cyber Ninjas — a tiny cybersecurity company from Sarasota, Fla. This is the first election audit ever run by Cyber Ninjas. You did not read that wrong: Before being handed the lead position in maybe the most consequential post-election audit ever, Cyber Ninjas had run zero election audits. Understandably, nobody in the elections community had ever heard of Cyber Ninjas. Neither Christian Ziegler, vice chairman of the Republican Party of Florida — where the Cyber Ninjas are from — nor Representative Vern Buchanan, whose election in 2006 caused changes to Florida election law, had previously heard of, or worked with, Cyber Ninjas. That’s right: The state that gave America the hanging chad had never heard of Cyber Ninjas.

Even more troubling than the lack of any election-audit experience are the publicly stated beliefs of Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan.

If you read the piece and wonder if you're really at the National Review just read some of the comments. "What are you afraid of?" That's easy. I'm afraid a clearly unqualified company lead by a CEO with a predetermine agenda is going to hand a weapon based on lies to the Republicans who hate democracy because it doesn't guarantee them victory. I think that's something that every real American should fear. It's the fascists' fig leaf of supposed reasonableness when in reality it is anything but reasonable.

[goldenvalley]

Richer is clearly some evil Democrat plant. No one will believe anything he says.

[pnwguy]

May 28, 2021 20:43:38 GMT goldenvalley said:

Richer is clearly some evil Democrat plant. No one will believe anything he says.

No, clearly Richer is a worshipper of Satan.  How else could he be against the Lord's Work in Maricopa County?  

[LFC]

It's hardball down in Texass (paywalled).

In the final hours of the legislative session, Texas Democrats devised a plan to kill a sweeping legislative package that would limit early voting hours, make it more difficult to vote by mail and restrict options like drive-through voting. The bill seemed guaranteed to pass through both Republican-majority chambers, and has the backing of Gov. Greg Abbott (R).

As the session inched closer to midnight, Democrats slowly but steadily trickled out. At around 10:30 p.m., the remaining Democrats left. All of a sudden, the House lacked the two-thirds of members needed for a quorum, and couldn’t vote on the remaining bills including the voting overhaul. Democrats congregated at a nearby Baptist church, thought to be a tacit protest against the provision in the bill that would curtail early voting hours on Sundays.

The governor and lieutenant governor, steamed at the Democrats’ gambit, are insisting that the legislation be passed in a special session.

Abbott is throwing a hissy fit.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced that he will veto the part of the state budget that funds the legislature, seeming retaliation for Texas Democrats’ walkout late Sunday that let them at least temporarily kill Republicans’ voting overhaul.

“No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” Abbott tweeted.

[LFC]

The grifters and fascists are trying to export their democracy assault techniques to other states.

A so-called election audit that is being sponsored by the Arizona state Senate will allow tours by some out-of-state lawmakers.

KPNX correspondent Brahm Resnik revealed on Twitter that a delegation of Pennsylvania Republicans will meet with members of the Arizona Legislature on Wednesday before being treated to a "tour" of the audit.

The lawmakers are considering conducting a similar audit in their state.

[LFC]

Pennsylvania's Republican fascists traveled to Arizona to study what election audit fraud (the "faudit") looks like.

If you were involved in the Trump-aligned efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum is the hottest place to be.

Three Republican members of Pennsylvania’s legislature are in Arizona Wednesday. They will be observing the Arizona state Senate’s shambolic audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 results.

The trip was first announced by the Arizona auditors, and confirmed in interviews the Pennsylvania lawmakers gave the Epoch Times.

“I kind of see this as a fact-finding mission to see what’s happening on the ground in Arizona,” Pennsylvania state Rep. Rob Kauffman (R) told The Epoch Times.

He’s joined on the trip by Republican Pennsylvania Sens. Doug Mastriano and Cris Dush.

None of the lawmakers’ offices responded to inquiries about the trip from TPM. Mastriano tweeted Wednesday that “ZERO” taxpayer dollars were being spent to pay for it.

[goldenvalley]

So who paid for the trip? Politicians never go anywhere on their own dime.